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Bela Bartok Quotes

Competitions are for horses, not artists.

Competitions are for horses, not artists.

Bela Bartok
Inspirational, Funny, Inspiring

Folk melodies are the embodiment of an artistic perfection of the highest order; in fact, they are models of the way in which a musical idea can be expressed with utmost perfection in terms of brevity of form and simplicity of means.

Bela Bartok
Mean, Order, Ideas

It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach.

Bela Bartok
Believe, May, Composer

I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.

Bela Bartok
Music, Absolutely Nothing
Quoted in Machlis Introduction to Contemporary Music (1963).

With maturity comes the wish to economize - to be more simple. Maturity is the period when one finds the just measure.

Bela Bartok
Maturity, Simple, Wish

His pagan barbarity, his explosive and angrily defiant melancholy, his demoniacal instinct . . . these are all echoes . . . of the thousand-year-old Hungarian psyche.

Bela Bartok
Music, Echoes, Years

In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.

Bela Bartok
Art, Development, Matter
"Enjoyment of Music: An Introduction to Perceptive Listening". Book by Joseph Machlis, 1955.

Our peasant music, naturally, is invariably tonal, if not always in the sense that the inflexible major and minor system is tonal. (An "atonal" folk-music, in my opinion, is unthinkable.) Since we depend upon a tonal basis of this kind in our creative work, it is quite self-evident that our works are quite pronouncedly tonal in type. I must admit, however, that there was a time when I thought I was approaching a species of twelve-tone music. Yet even in works of that period the absolute tonal foundation is unmistakable.

Bela Bartok
Self, Creative, Tone
"The Listening Composer". Book by George Perle, pp. 46-47, 1996.

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